


Just Like a Woman

by voodoochild



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Awesome Ladies Ficathon, Childhood, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-07
Updated: 2010-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All nine-year-old Joan Holloway wants is a pearl necklace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Like a Woman

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LadyFest '10, for the prompt "dress me up, dress me down".

All nine-year-old Joan Holloway wants is a pearl necklace.

She begs her mother every Christmas, every birthday. She says she'll be the best little girl in Poughkeepsie if Mommy and Daddy buy her a pearl necklace. And not a silly small one like Rita Benetti has - a real one, with a clasp and no elastic.

"No," her mother says, applying lipstick and then blotting it with a tissue. "Not until you're sixteen, Joannie. When you're a woman."

Women wear pearls. Women wear beautiful dresses and do their hair. They wear lipstick. They dab perfume on wrists and necks, and buckle high heels on their feet. They marry strong, handsome, successful men and go on to have children. This is what women are.

(She doesn't know, not then, that her mother's "stockings" are charcoal pencil. That their dinner is made from a Victory Garden and ration coupons. That the "parties" Mommy and Daddy go to are mostly an excuse to wear finery once a year. That the money Mommy used to spend on jewelry now has to go toward the war effort.)

On her sixteenth birthday, Joan Holloway doesn't get her pearl necklace - her parents are down at the drugstore, watching what will be the first televised congressional hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They're cheering on Senator McCarthy, and it turns her stomach so much that she borrows her mother's favorite pair of heels and puts on her shortest skirt, and goes down to Vassar to see her college friends. They make her feel grown-up, not the ugly-duckling daughter of Priscilla and John Holloway.

She loses her virginity that night (to a sailor, tall and dashing, and truth be told, more than a little reminiscent of another sailor she'll know years in the future in Manhattan), and it's proof that she's a woman. She sneaks back into the house after midnight and her parents never know.

She never mentions the necklace again.

The first thing Joan bought with her first three paychecks from Sterling-Cooper was a beautiful - if small - pearl necklace. It was perfect, it went with everything - especially her green brassiere and garter set - and it was one of the best things she'd ever owned. Roger thought it was "adorable", but never tried to talk her into replacing it. He's obtuse at times, but he isn't stupid. He knows what it means to a middle-class girl from Poughkeepsie.

Two months after she marries Greg, there's a box sitting on her vanity. It's a new pearl necklace, precisely the kind she'd wanted as a child. She looks into the mirror, at the fingerprint-bruises around her arm from when he was drunk last night. Sees the dark circles under her eyes and the way her hands shake as she holds the box. It takes her a long time to put on the necklace, lace up her best company dress, and come downstairs to kiss her husband.

Joan knows - this is what women are.


End file.
